Experts have raised concerns that Nigeria could be facing its worst threat to food security, following persistent herdsmen attack on the nation’s food basket.
Speaking exclusively to BusinessDay, Ike Ubaka, the President of All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) pointed out that unless serious measures are taken, Nigeria’s drive towards economic growth and diversification through agriculture may never be attained.
Apart from the lives lost and direct threat to the country’s ability to produce enough food to feed its citizens, Ubaka is further worried that, “There is poor insurance of local farmers.”
“There is no haulage insurance. The traders and the middle-men exploit the intelligence of the local farmers and nobody cares. The farmer has to be insured,” he says, “There must be field insurance, input insurance, Livestock insurance, drought insurance and even conflict insurance. The government must priortise this. It is essential,” Ubaka adds.
Nigeria began exporting yam tubers to the United States and Europe last year to diversify foreign exchange earnings and even targets the export of 480 tons of yams, equivalent to 20 containers monthly in 2018, as a measure of diversification of its revenue base.
Benue State where the herdsmen recently unleashed serious aggression is the country is major producer of yams, cassava and Guinea corn. The state is also known for producing groundnuts, soya beans, rice as well as fruits.
Simon Irtwange, the Chairman Technical Committee on Nigeria’s Yam export Programme said the United States had made a request for the supply of five containers monthly which amounted to 120 tonnes of yams.
Experts are now worried that this plan and Nigeria’s food sufficiency drive is threatened by continuous conflict in this food producing region.
Nigeria reportedly spends billions of dollars importing food which it can produce annually to feed its people. Amid dwindling oil resources and lower foreign exchange earnings, experts say that such huge spending is no longer sustainable as the federal government looks to diversify its revenue base, particularly with Agriculture which adds majorly to the economy and is the largest employer of Labour in the country.
Nigeria’s economy which exited a 15-month painful recession in the second quarter of 2017 grew by 1.4 percent in the third quarter driven by increased crude oil production and sustained growth in agricultural output.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the Nigeria’s GDP growth in the third quarter 2017 was driven by 25.89 percent growth in the mining and quarrying sector and 3.06 percent growth in the agricultural sector.
Celestine Okeke, Lead Partner Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency, Advocacy and Support initiative is concerned that with rising unemployment in the country and currently standing at 18.8 percent, fuel challenge and the conflict ridden food belt.
“The government must intensify efforts on the security in the food belt. The unemployment rate is high and the farmers are also dying by conflicts’ government must find lasting solution to these problems, unless all are food security talk are rhetoric’s,” he tells BusinessDay
SB Morgen Intelligence in its analysis titled ‘The Pastoral Conflict takes a deadlier turn’ also warned that the current pastoral conflict has more economic implications to the country than the conflict in the north east.
“The long term effects will also be that youths used to getting their sustenance through violence take a longer time to return to productive work like farming or rearing their cattle,” SBM said.
“First, the cattle industry is underperforming. Commerce always provides an incentive for all involved to improve the value provided. If farmers knew some of their produce could be traded with the herdsmen for acceptable payment, there would be the incentive to provide quality feeds to the herders’ cattle, improving the meat and milk yields.”
It added that Cattle is a source of beef and the security threatens the ability to get them to their markets in the south. Most of the communities in the Middle-Belt where the attacks have taken place are in the much vaunted ‘food basket’ of the country.
HARRISON EDEH, ABUJA
